Syracuse, N.Y. -- The fellow who has come off so composed, so cool, so controlled while serving as the face of Syracuse University football (and never mind what he’s like behind closed doors) made a confession earlier this week after he was asked about the Super Bowl.

“My guess,” said Doug Marrone, “is that I’ll be a . . . what? A raving maniac? Yeah, that’s probably what I’ll be as I watch that game. A raving maniac. I imagine that it would be very difficult to watch that thing with me.”

He insists that he’ll be wearing a New Orleans Saints shirt. He promises that his bride, Helen, will pull on her Drew Brees jersey. He thinks he’ll farm the three kids out for the evening so that he can more freely bask and/or suffer.

And, well, you really can’t blame the man. Before being hired back in December of 2008 to drag the Orange football program out of the ditch, Marrone had served for three years -- 2006, '07 and '08 -- as the Saints’ offensive coordinator and as a kind of mentor to Brees, New Orleans’ brilliant quarterback.

So, what’s he supposed to do Sunday night? Put his feet up on the ottoman, balance the bag of chips on his belly and idle away a few hours fiddling around with the remote?

“I know I’ll be screaming,” Marrone said. “I know I’ll be a fan. I can’t remember the last football game I watched outside of my job, so I’m not really sure how far I’ll go. But come on. I’m invested in these guys.”

That would be the Saints, whose attack he helped shape with Sean Payton, the New Orleans head coach. That would be those athletes who went 26-24 during Marrone’s three campaigns with an offense that roared and a defense that leaked. That would be the underdogs to Peyton Manning’s Indianapolis Colts, a buttoned-down outfit that has recently been there and done that on the Super Bowl stage.

Marrone remains invested in them, sure. After all, he was with that organization when it finally re-opened the Louisiana Superdome in September of 2006 -- or 13 months after Hurricane Katrina had shuttered it -- in the Saints’ season inaugural against Atlanta. He looked around the full house that afternoon and saw the faithful, some with tears of joy streaming down cheeks, looking back. He watched the franchise morph into a power between the lines and into an inspiration in the community.

But it’s a funny thing. While Doug says he may well cry Sunday evening -- and that’s whether the Saints win or lose -- he swears there’s not a fiber in his mind, body or soul that would rather be in Sun Light Stadium than at home in front of his TV.

“There’s really not,” said Marrone as he sat in his campus office. “I really worked so hard to get this job that if I had been in New Orleans this season, I would have been wishing all along that I was the head coach at Syracuse. I would have enjoyed the ride, no question. But wherever I’ve been, I’ve always wanted to be here. And that would be true even at the Super Bowl.”

He will, though, be only too delighted to be off the Orange clock (for once) on Sunday.

The recruiting path has been beaten and the young whiz-bangs have delivered their signatures. The football clinic that he’ll attend today in Hartford, driving to that burg this morning and driving home from it this evening, will have come and gone. Work on the 2010 playbook won’t begin with his staff until Monday morning.

And that leaves Sunday, when Doug Marrone plans to eat more than he should and join the Who Dat Nation, even if he’ll be some 1,400 miles removed from the South Florida chapter of it.

“You have two marquee quarterbacks who are very, very, very intelligent and are on-the-field coaches,” he said. “So the football guy in me is going to be looking at how the defenses are going to try to attack Brees and Manning.

“I’ll be interested in what the defensive coordinators do early on and how they change during the game. Because, believe me, the defenses are going to change. If you get into too much of a defensive rhythm with Brees or Manning, you’re going to get yourself in some trouble. And both sides know that.”

The high-scoring affair that everybody seems to have predicted? Marrone merely shrugged at the thought. Ever the coach, he suggested that with such unknowns as turnovers and penalties just waiting to tilt the contest one way or the other, forecasting becomes folly. And so, he refused to guess who would win and by how much.

But that didn’t mean his heart couldn’t be read as if it were a highway billboard. Indeed, Doug Marrone -- once a kid in the Bronx . . . later an Orangeman . . . now the boss in Syracuse -- is a Saint, capital S, with blood that runs black and gold (in and around all that orange stuff). And Brees, who threw for 13,910 yards and 88 touchdowns on Doug's three-year watch in New Orleans, is one of the biggest reasons why.

“He’s the kind of guy where 20, 30 years down the line people are going to say, ‘I’m glad I had the chance to be around Drew Brees’,” Marrone declared. “If you spent any time with him, you wouldn’t think twice about picking him to start a team with. And that’s not just from what he does on the field, but what he does off the field.”

And then, Marrone got something that looked like a glint in his eye.

“The thing with Drew is this,” Doug said. “He throws the ball where our guys can catch it and the other guys can’t.”

(Bud Poliquin’s columns, his "To The Point" observations and his freshly-written on-line commentaries appear virtually every day on syracuse.com. Additionally, his work appears regularly on the pages of The Post-Standard newspaper. E-mail: bpoliquin@syracuse.com.)